Is There a Healthy, Life-Enriching Way to Use Twitter?
I’ve been a Twitter user since August 2017. It’s been a bumpy ride, to say the least. I had at least four of my tweets flagged by Twitter’s “misinformation” algorithms or teams, for gently questioning certain aspects of the official Covid narrative (such as the notion that a healthy child needs to vaccinate against Covid-19), and was kicked off Twitter for over a year. Then Elon came along and restored some semblance of free speech, and I finally saw my Twitter account brought back to life on Christmas day 2022.
My experience of Twitter has been a mixed one. On the one hand, I’ve found valuable information on a range of topics that is sometimes hard to come by in mainstream media, on issues like pandemic policy, climate policy, 15 minute cities, transgender ideology, the rise of the bio-surveillance State, and localist movements cropping up across the world. I have found refuge in Twitter from the mind-numbing nostrums of mainstream media, especially once Elon lifted the ridiculous censorship.
On the other hand, Twitter, like other social media, is designed to be addictive, and to play into our primal need for validation and social affirmation. It is easy for the Twittersphere to take on an importance in our lives that is out of all proportion to reality. We can find ourselves overly invested in an alternate online reality and insufficiently invested in the tangible, corporal reality of our everyday lives. It is easy to exaggerate one’s own importance in the virtual public square, hanker after those retweets and views, or fret about a drop in our following, in ways that distract our attention from the greater drama of our life, which mostly unfolds offline.